10 March 2010

Blackwater personnel appear to have gone to exceptional lengths to obtain weapons from U.S. military weapons storehouses intended for use by the Afghan police...Blackwater on at least two occasions acquired hundreds of rifles and pistols from a U.S. military facility near Kabul called 22 Bunkers by the military and Pol-e Charki by the Afghans. Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. military forces in the Middle East and South Asia, wrote to the committee to explain that “there is no current or past written policy, order, directive, or instruction that allows U.S. Military contractors or subcontractors in Afghanistan to use weapons stored at 22 Bunkers"...

....On one of those occasions, in September 2008, Chief Warrant Officer Greg Sailer, who worked at 22 Bunkers and is a friend of a Blackwater officer working in Afghanistan, signed over more than 200 AK-47sto an individual identified as “Eric Cartman” or possibly “Carjman” from Blackwater’s Counter Narcotics Training Unit. A Blackwater lawyer told committee staff that no one by those names has ever been employed by the company.

It gets even better when you check out a blog entry from Ackerman posted last night, where he recounted his experience sitting in on the Senate Armed Services Committee's investigation of Blackwater/Xe. How Spencer kept a straight face while asking this question is beyond me.

[Michigan Senator Carl] Levin gave some brief remarks introducing his findings but didn’t mention Cartman. I raised my hand and asked him if Blackwater actually used the name of a ‘South Park’ character to sign for the guns. Levin, bless him, appeared to be unfamiliar with ‘South Park,’ a sign that the universe works as it is supposed to. His staffers suppressed grins and calmly pointed out that no one with the name ‘Eric Cartman’ has ever worked for Blackwater, and I was free to draw my own conclusions.

I thought the world couldn't be any more surreal, but I was wrong. Spencer also goes on to inform us that art will be imitating life tonight as South Park tackles Blackwater/Xe. Comedy Central released this 10-second clip:

There are few things in life that actually make me speechless. Thanks to the Internet, though, I seem to be discovering them on a routine basis. Tune in tonight at 10 PM Eastern/9 PM Central on Comedy Central.

1 comment:

The thing that (now) astounds me is that the guy who turned over the weapons wasn’t some E-3 or E-4, but a CWO — one who obviously should have known better. Here’s hoping that the Navy has him scraping paint for the rest of his (final) enlistment.